Up
to the point of the burial the evangelists followed the chronology of
Seneca, which was determined by the requirement of ancient tragedy that
the entire action develop in a short period of time, usually not longer
than a day. The death of Jesus marked the end of Act Three. In the play
the beginning of a new act was usually indicated by some reference to
the progression of dramatic time. That is why Matthew begins his account
of the burial of Jesus with the words:

Since
it had already gotten late, a rich man from Arimathea arrived; his name
was Joseph, and he also was a disciple of Jesus.

Interpreters
understand this as a reference to the lateness of the hour‑it was
afternoon or early evening. But it seems that Matthew was translating
literally a Latin phrase signifying lateness for the performance of a
certain task, in this case the burial of the executed criminals before
the coming of the holy day.[1]
This urgency is made clear by John (19:31). The phrasing of Matthew suggests
that there was a lull of time between the death of Jesus and the arrival
of Joseph of Arimathea, who was to bury Jesus, an impression that is supported
by the other two gospels. The interval was occupied by a choral song chanted
by the Daughters of Jerusalem, one of those longer songs that marked the
division between two conscutive acts of a play. It is in this song that
the portents were described.

In all four gospels the character called Joseph of Arimathea is introduced
through a sudden transition in the text. For Luke the appearance of Joseph
of Arimathea on the stage as the one who buried Jesus appears to have
come as a surprise, even though he tries to identify him:

And
behold, there was a man by the name of Joseph who was a member of the
Council... from Arimathea, a city of the Jews. This one, going to where
Pilate was, asked for the body of Jesus.

The expression to where Pilate was (tô Pilatô) confirms that Pilate
was no longer on the stage. To approach him, Joseph had to go inside the
praetorium through one of the side entrances that were reserved
for the use of messengers and servants. Since Joseph was coming from the
city, he entered the stage from the right and, after identifying himself
to the women, used the entrance on the same side of the stage to enter
the praetorium.

For about two centuries interpreters have tried to explain why the gospels
should make a point of identifying by name a person to whom no reference
is made anywhere else. Schonfield remarks about Joseph of Arimathea:

He
is one of the great mysteries of the gospelshe enters the story unheralded,
and after his task is fulfilled he disappears completely from the New
Testament records. There is no indication whatever of his association
with the apostles or that he openly joined the Nazorean movement.[2]

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Raymond Brown uses the incongruity of the precise identification of Joseph
to argue that it must be a matter of a specific historical recollection.[3] But it is rather the lack of any such
historical recollection that caused the evangelists to gather biographical
details about him. As David F. Strauss remarked about a hundred and fifty
years ago,

That
we have here a personal description gradually developed into more and
more preciseness is evident.[4]

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As indicated by Paul’s letters, the earthly life of Jesus was of little
interest to the first Christians: their faith centered on the event of
the resurrection to which the burial was directly related. Therefore on
the matter of the burial they may have kept precise traditions. To their
knowledge it was Nicodemus who had buried Jesus. Nicodemus is mentioned
several times by John. He was a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, a member
of the Council who was favorably inclined towards Jesus and paid him a
night visit.

John solved the problem of the unexpected mention of Joseph of Arimathea
as the one who buried Jesus by letting Jesus be buried by Joseph and Nicodemus
together. The other gospels tried to give substance to the unexpected
figure by ascribing to him some of the traits of Nicodemus. This process
is most evident in Luke:

Luke's description is the most detailed:

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And
behold, there was a man by the name of Joseph, who was a member of the
Council, a noble and just manhe had not agreed with the decision and actions
of the other membersfrom Arimathea, a city of the Jews.

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The other gospels do not explain of which council Joseph was a member;
and, in fact, there are interpreters who argue that Joseph may have been
a member of the local council of the city of Arimathea. But Luke understood
that Joseph was a member of the same Jewish Council of Jerusalem that
had decided that Jesus should be put to death; hence, in order to explain
how a member of the same group would have intervened to bury Jesus, Luke
had to introduce the novel information that there was one member of this
Council who had dissented from all the others.

In Mark, the name Joseph, the one from Arimathea, is followed by the note:

a
distinguished member of the Council who too was waiting for the kingdom
of God.

Like Luke, Mark made Joseph a member of the Council, but thought it better
to omit Matthew’s information that he was a disciple of Jesus. Had such
a disciple existed, the Christians would have heard of him earlier.

John offers a similar explanation of the unexpected appearance of Joseph
of Arimathea, and for his being unknown to the Christian community; he
lets his name be followed by the note:

He
was a disciple of Jesus

a
secret one because of fear of the Jews.

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The fact that he was a secret disciple would explain the sudden and unexpected
appearance of a person previously unknown.

The explanation for the puzzlement of the gospel writers about the figure
of Joseph of Arimathea is a simple one. Seneca must have made appear on
the stage a character identified as Joseph ab aromatis. The phrase
ab aromatis indicated that Joseph was a dealer in spices, but since
corpses were smeared with spices, it had the general meaning of embalmer,
or undertaker. The kernel of the entire problem is that the Christian
audience of Seneca’s play did not understand the expression "Joseph
ab aromatis" because it embodied a particular twist of the
Latin language which did not have any parallel in Greek, the language
with which this audience was familiar; [5]
they understood that Joseph was coming epi [from] Arimathaias.

The gospel writers must have had difficulty in locating this Arimathea:
Luke would not have added a city of the Jews if it had been a known place.
There is no evidence that a place with a name similar to Arimathea existed
in Palestine in the time of Jesus;[6]
on the other hand, the gospels themselves stress the link between Joseph
and aromata.

According to John, Nicodemus came to help Joseph by carrying about one
hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe. A traditional interpretation holds that
Nicodemus brought this huge amount because he felt guilty for not having
openly supported Jesus earlier. More modern explanations try to gather
evidence to the effect that there is a Johanine penchant for extravagant
numbers.[7] But, since this evidence is doubtful, it has been
argued that that the figure one hundred is the result of a scribal error.[8]
But it cannot be the result of a scribal error, because if the weight
of the spices had been an ordinary one, like ten, twenty, or even thirty
pounds, John would not have had any reason to mention it.

There may be a scribal error in the verse in question, but not in the
figure for the weight of the spices. Most editions of the gospels follow
the manuscripts according to which Nicodemus came carrying a mixture [migma]
of myrrh and aloe, about one hundred pounds, but there are authoritative
manuscripts in which instead of migma there is written heligma,
bundle.[9]
This indicates that Joseph appeared on the stage followed by an assistant
who carried a big bundle of spices, a bundle which indicated Joseph’s
profession and task. This bundle had to be big for the sake of visibility
on the stage. Joseph was a professional embalmer, whose task it was to
bury all of the executed criminals before the coming of the holy day.
Hence he had on hand a large supply of the tools of his trade, some of
which he later offered for sale to the women. But not all of the spices
he was carrying were intended for Jesus.

After identifying himself to the women as an ab aromatis, and emphasizing
the urgency of his missionIt is already getting lateJoseph entered the
praetorium, presenting himself before Pilate, who was understood
to be inside. Only the chorus and Joseph’s assistant remained on the stage.
There must have been in the play some dialogue between Joseph’s helper
and the chorus, in which he extolled the services that his master could
render, and indicated that he had an abundant supply of all kinds of spices,
by pointing to the bundle he was carrying. Seneca had introduced the helper
in order to sustain action on the stage during this episode of the third
act, because according to the conventions of ancient drama the chorus
could be left alone on the stage only during the interludes between acts.
The presence of an actor, in conjunction with the chorus, meant that the
dramatic action was in progress. Besides, Joseph would later need an assistant
to carry the body of Jesus to the tomb.

The three synoptic gospels relate that Joseph asked Pilate for permission
to take down the body of Jesus, but John mentions also a preceding episode
in which it is the Jews who ask Pilate for the same permission, pointing
out that according to Jewish customs a body cannot lie unburied through
the Sabbath. This verse of John has created difficulty for traditional
commentators: Was the permission to take down the body submitted to Pilate
by the Jews or by Joseph? Many interpreters agree that the Jews of whom
John is speaking must be some Jewish authority such as the high priests.
A request of this kind had to be submitted to the Roman governor in a
most formal way and hence was a proper action for the Jewish Council.

In the play the undertaker Joseph, upon entering the stage with his assistant,
announced to the women that he was an ab aromatis who had been
charged by the Jewish Council to obtain Pilate’s permission to take down
the bodies of all the executed criminals and bury them. The request to
Pilate was thus submitted by the Council through Joseph. In this respect
Joseph acted merely as a messenger. Luke, however, preferred to understand
that the request came out of the good heart of Joseph himself; yet he
preserved part of the original story by making Joseph into a member of
the Jewish Council. The idea that Joseph was a member of the Council resulted
from the fact that in his first speech upon entering the stage he mentioned
being sent by the Council. John, having mentioned the application by the
Jews, did not have to make Joseph into a member of the Council.

The entire episode of the petition to Pilate must have come as a suprise
to the Christian audience; Seneca had introduced it in order to put across
a tenet of his philosophy. In his On Clemency, which was the major
statement of his philosophical and political ideals, Seneca lists specifically
among the acts of mercy that must be performed by the good ruler that
of allowing the burial even of exectuted criminals. The Roman custom was
to let the bodies of those executed by crucifixion hang until they were
destroyed by decay or by predatory animals; according to the Romans this
was a way for crucifixion to achieve its salutary effect of preserving
the existing social order. Seneca, who was already repelled by the penalty
of crucifixion, would have been most pleased to point out that there was
a Jewish law to the effect that even executed criminals should be given
burial.[10]

The Jewish rule, however, was not based on humanitarian principles. All
commentators of the gospels, ancient and modern, agree that the rule was
based on Deuteronomy (21:22-23), and that this is the text pertinent
to the taking down of Jesus.[11]
The so-called Gospel of Peter quotes this passage of Deuteronomy.
The passage prescribes that the body of an executed criminal must
be hung on a tree, but it must not remain unburied through the night because
a hanged man is accursed by God. From Josephus we learn that the Jews
extended the rule of Deuteronomy to the case of crucifixon.[12]

The reason why interpreters are loath to amit that Joseph was relaying
to Pilate a request originating from the Council, is that they cannot
face the fact, stated so clearly by John, that the purpose of the Jewish
request was to accelerate Jesus’ death, so that he could be buried, along
with the other criminals, before the arrival of the holy day. When Joseph
transmitted the Jewish Council’s request to Pilate, he did not yet know
that Jesus was already dead. Joseph had arrived from the right, the direction
of the city, and was not yet aware of the circumstances of Jesus’ death
that had been narrated to the mourning women in the previous act. Joseph
evidently assumed that Jesus was still alive, since he had been on the
cross for only a few hours; death on the cross was a protracted affair,
normally lasting several days.[13]

Joseph’s request to Pilate was not only for permission to bury the executed
criminals, but to hurry along their deaths, so that the burials could
be completed without delay. The proof is that in acceding to the request,
Pilate instructed the soldiers to proceed to the crurifragium, the
breaking of the legs, which accelerated death in the case of crucifixion.
If the legs were broken, the crucified could no longer struggle to hold
himself upwhich was one of the basic tortuous elements of crucifixionand
would die of suffocation. The centurion sent by Pilate to carry out this
decision did not speak to anybody on the stagehe returned to the praetorium
and reported directly to Pilate.

[1]
In the play the information about the time was given by Joseph, probably
using an expression such as et iam serum factum est. In the Silver
Age Latin of Seneca' time, et iam was often used in cases where
classical authors would have employed cum iam. Hence the import
Joseph's words is: "Because time is running out, and the holiday
is approaching, the Jewish Council has sent me to present to Pilate
their request that the executions be finished and the bodies buried."
Cf. Seneca' Thyestes (line 487): serum cavendi tempus: "it
is a late hour to be warning."

[5]
When in the century preceding the Christian era the economic life of
Rome became more complex than it used to be, it became necessary to
find a way to designate professional specializations that had not existed
before. The Romans solved the problem by using expressions such as a
stabula, a balneis, ab apotheca, a bibliotheca, to indicate a person
in charthe stable, the baths, the storeroom, the library. When these
expressions were first used in the Latin language they were often preceded
by the noun servus, such as servus a stabula, "the
svant from the stable." These new formulations with a were
awkward and gave to the preposition a an unexpected meaning.
As a result, in the course of the first century A.D. they we replaced
by new words like stabularius, apothecarius, and bibliothecarius.
But these neologisms were avoided in formal and literary speech,
which continued to employ the peculiar a stabula, ab apotheca and
a bibliotheca.

[6]
Early Christians appear to have decided that the place was Ramathaim-Sophim
mentioed in theOld Testament as the birthplace of Samuel (I. Sam. I.1).
Modern interpreters have pointed out that the Old Testament mentions
Ramathaim in the context of events that preceded the death of Jesus
by about one thousand years.

[9]
This reading is found notably in the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus mss.

[10]
A text of the jurist Ulpian, who reflects the humanitarian ideals of
the Empire in the second century, indicates that it was common to grant
this grace to the family of the crucified.

[11]
Paul refers to the rule of Deuteronomy in Galatians 3:13: Christ redeemed
us from the malediction of the Law by becoming himself an accursed thing
for our sake, since it is written: A curse is on everyone who is hung
on a pole.

[13]
Herodotus (VII.194) mentions the case of Sandoces, governor of Cyme,
who had been crucified by Darius some time before...but while he yet
hung on the cross, Darius... confessing that he had acted with more
haste than wisdom, ordered him to be taken down and set at large. Thus
Sandoces escaped destruction at the hands of Darius and was alive at
this time.